NONVIOLENT DRUG ABUSERS NEED TREATMENT, NOT JAIL WASHINGTON-- We didn't need any more dramatic examples of how drug addiction should be treated as a health issue, but Robert Downey, Jr.has given one to us anyway. Like Darryl Strawberry, Downey just can't seem to keep illegal drugs out of his bloodstream or his body out of jail. While most of the rest of the country was enjoying Thanksgiving weekend, Downey was getting busted for possession of cocaine and methamphetamines in his Palm Springs, Calif., hotel room, after police were alerted by a tipster. The arrest comes barely three months after he left Corcoran State Prison in California, where he served little more than a three-year sentence. That sentence came after years of drug-related incidents, arrests. But the comedy masks our national astonishment: Downey had the money and connections to get the best treatment possible. He also had a bright future. He had just joined TV's "Ally McBeal" cast, received rave reviews, and signed to begin two new movie deals. And after all that, he still couldn't kick the habit? What's wrong with him? Similar questions are raised by Strawberry, the former baseball star and current colon cancer patient, who was arrested Oct. 25 after walking away from a residential drug treatment center in Florida. He had been under house arrest there for 1999 charges of drug possession and soliciting a prostitute. While AWOL from the treatment center, prosecutors say, he smoked crack cocaine and took 10 antidepressant pills. Do these men have a death wish? By their own accounts, yes. "Life hasn't been worth living for me, that's the honest truth," news accounts quoted Strawberry as saying in court. "I am not afraid of death." It's "like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal," Downey told a judge last year. With those words, Strawberry and Downey speak for addicts everywhere. They have a death wish, whether or not they realize it. The question for the rest of users, do we want to help them pull the trigger? Or can more of these sad cases be saved? California voters recently approved an initiative to spend $60 million to divert nonviolent drug abusers in the state's prison system into treatment programs. Drug-related incarcerations grew 25-fold since 1980 in California, leading the nation, according to a study the Justice Policy Institute released in July. Almost half of all drug offenders imprisoned in California last year were imprisoned for simple possession, the institute reported. Other states should make similar moves. Nonviolent drug offenders have grown Faster than just about any other category of criminals in our nation's state prison population. Nearly one of four American prison inmates is 'being held on drug-related offenses, the institute reports. The number of violent offenders entering state prisons has doubled, and the number of nonviolent prisoners has tripled. Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) has proposed federal funding for states that seek to divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison. On the Republican side, you have small-government drug reformers like Rep. Tom Campbell of California who has argued for more prison drug-treatment programs and even experiments in supplying drugs to addicts the way Zurich, Switzerland, tried with mixed success. Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler also has endorsed modifying his state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders to encourage more treatment. New York's Republican Gov. George Pataki has talked about making similar modifications in that state's get-tough drug laws. We have a fought a war on drugs -- as Reagan used to say about Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty -- and drugs have won. A major reason is our failure to treat the conditions, psychological and otherwise, that lead users to abuse the stuff in the first place. As jailbirds go, Downey and Strawberry put a face on America's drug plague that the movies seldom show. Neither Downey nor Strawberry has stuck a gun under anyone's nose or busted open a parking meter to get the change inside. At its best, the criminal justice system has helped stop drug addicts.from killing themselves. But when it lets nonviolent offenders back on the street without treating the conditions psychological, and otherwise, that feed the addiction, the system only feeds the problem it is trying to prevent.
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